Description
24th August 1983. The scene: a small and chaotic terraced house in Craven Street, Coventry. Bob Oliver, main man of eclectic tape label Slob Tapes, and Alan Rider, head of early industrial label Adventures in Reality Recordings (Attrition, Stress, Irsol, SPK, Test Department, Muslimgauze and others) and one half of electronic duo Stress, have come together with the mysterious Cryptic Z Mostmen to record a single track, ‘Mummies and Madmen Grow Dark in the Sun’, over the course of an afternoon. It was an inventive period in music, where anything was possible and Coventry had its own very underground experimental electronic scene comprising Attrition, Stress, Irsol, Sea of Wires and the Adventures in Reality label. Everyone shared equipment, accommodation, and often band members. Bob was a drummer/percussionist who would later perform live with Attrition. He went by the name Gamla Stan on recordings. Alan ran the Adventures in Reality fanzine and label, performed and recorded in Stress, released early Attrition material and created and operated Human League style slide and film projections on the band’s UK and European tours. No one knew what Cryptic Z Mostman did.
Mummies and Madmen was never intended to have a future. It was formed for the duration of that one track, a mix of throbbing drum machine, synthesiser feedback, PiL style bass and scratchy, reverb drenched, guitar that contorted, evolved and mutated over the course of 20 minutes. Fourteen months later Gamla Stan and Cryptic Z Mostmen came together again to record a second track, ‘Red Front’. Both tracks were released later in 1984 on Slob Tapes under the Mummies and Madmen name as a C45 tape album, Slob 008. That would probably have been that. Until now that is, when a surviving copy of the cassette was unearthed and re-mastered for this reissue.
